


Wounding Eternity

by cardinalstar



Series: The Strongest Ties [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Casual Reality-Warping, Gen, STAR Labs Particle Accelerator, Soulbonds, Telepathic Dragons, season one AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 10:45:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9178228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cardinalstar/pseuds/cardinalstar
Summary: All Barry wanted to do was get to the CCPD on time, feed his dragon partner, and work through his massive backlog of cases in time to watch the STAR Labs particle accelerator turn on.(Seriously though - his partner is atime-eating dragonand he's still late for everything.  How can one person be this unlucky?  The world may never know.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> In honor of Dragon Week, I have dusted off this AU that I had laying around and polished it up with the help of my friend GuardianLioness. We will both be posting oneshots set in this universe throughout the week! The prompts I used for Day 1 were "First Meeting" and "Hoard." 
> 
> I hope you enjoy the first part of this series, and please don't hesitate to ask questions!

Barry had long since accepted that he couldn’t control the weather.  If he could, it would remain a balmy sixty-five degrees in Central City for at least seven months out of the year.  It would also _definitely_ not be raining on the date of the STAR Labs particle accelerator launch, because that was just bad luck.  

Being able to control traffic, though?  That was a luxurious fantasy.  Arriving late to work was bad enough, but arriving late on a day when he was supposed to present an important set of case files to Captain Singh?  That was just the icing on the cake.  

Barry stepped into the lab, pausing a moment to take a cursory glance around the room.  To his relief, Julian wasn’t here yet - the other CSI had said something yesterday about coming in late, so if he’d still managed to make it here before Barry, he would have been insufferable.  

Besides, being alone in the office had its perks.  

Barry set his messenger bag down on his desk and closed his eyes, reaching for the part of his awareness where his Tether was connected.   _Telastra,_ he thought into the quiet space.   _Are you there?_

His dragon’s response was immediate, lacking the drowsy sluggishness that was usually present in the early mornings.  Barry sensed a brief undercurrent of warm regard, tinged with exasperation, before Telastra slipped from her side of liminal space and out into the physical world.  

Barry leaned back against the desk and waited until he felt Telastra’s full attention on him before speaking again.  His dragon was fond of stretching when she stepped out into reality; apparently her dimension didn’t adhere to the same physical norms as far as gravity went, which seemed feasible enough to Barry.  He sometimes heard other dragontethers complain about their companions’ stretching and grooming rituals, but by this point he’d learned that the best way to avoid tripping over an invisible dragon was simply to stay put until Telastra had finished working the kinks out of her limbs.  

 _You were late to work again,_ Telastra chided, and Barry felt a puff of warm breath on his hand.   _That’s the second time this week.  It’s only Thursday, Barry._

“That means it’s almost the end of the week,” Barry rebutted.  He preferred speaking out loud to Telastra when he could; most people weren’t bothered by it, especially when he and Telastra were out walking on the streets, but it could be a bit on-the-nose in the office.  Julian in particular tended to get his back up about it, which had always annoyed Barry, since Julian was a dragontether too, but what could you do?  He reached out a hand, palm facing outward, and Telastra obligingly bumped her nose into it.  “Are you hungry yet?  Or is this gonna be a hoarding day?”

 _Hoarding.  You ran so many tests yesterday that I couldn’t eat another bite even if I wanted to,_ the dragon said wryly.   _Why are there so many packed together?_

“Singh has finally decided that we’ve done enough research on whether your diet affects test results,” Barry decided, scratching along Telastra’s brow ridges.  “Spoiler alert - it does not.  He’s decided he wants us to help work through some of the evidence backlog.”  

He sensed a flicker of incomprehension from his dragon and offered up the relevant memories of his discussion with Captain Singh; Telastra sifted through them rapidly before retreating from his headspace.   _A good cause indeed,_ she declared, moving away from Barry’s hand.   _I hope the captain is aware that I am not actually causing the tests to run any faster?_

“I was able to explain.  I promise I do realize you’re just eating the elapsed time,” Barry said, moving over to the lab bench and trusting that his dragon would follow without accidentally tripping him, “but to the casual observer, it just looks like we can run a two-hour test in four minutes.”

 _That’s a large stack of manila folders,_ Telastra commented dryly.   _It is double the size of our usual stack.  The captain is expecting us to run all of these tests today, I assume._

“The hazards of being too good at your job,” Barry said, rolling his eyes fondly as he began preparing the first sample.  

Telastra could crack as many jokes as she wanted to, but she and Barry really had gotten lucky.  Dragons preyed on a wide variety of metaphysical abstractions - Barry had heard of dragons that ate love, honor, truth, compassion, generosity, even things as obscure as chivalry - but seldom did the diet of a dragontether’s partner prove as easy to integrate into everyday life as Telastra’s had.  Time, as an abstraction, was relatively difficult for a dragon to eat.  It was something that humankind cared a great deal about, so there was plenty of energy available - the more of humanity’s collective consciousness that was dedicated to an abstraction, the more energy existed for dragons to consume.  On the other hand, humans tended to leech most of the surrounding time energy from the air as they hurried from one place to another - free time was always in short supply.  

Feeding Telastra had been challenging when they had first bonded.  Barry had been eleven, fresh off the death of his parents, when they had met, and neither of them had really been prepared.  Children were rarely approached by dragons - numerous studies had indicated that most dragons approached humans who were in their late teenage years, and for a while Joe hadn’t even believed that Barry _had_ tethered himself to a dragon.  

For a while, Barry had been terrified that his baby dragon would starve to death, especially since she refused to steal any time energy from him, even when she needed food desperately.  And god, was Telastra stubborn - she hadn’t even been willing to eat the time that Barry spent asleep, in spite of the fact that he’d offered it to her multiple times.  After a harrowing period of trial and error, Barry and Telastra had managed to find a few relatively safe methods of extracting enough time energy to keep her fed.  Candles were a favorite - Barry could light a candle, and Telastra could eat the time it took for the candle’s wick to burn through.  They’d completely burned through one of Joe’s nice holiday candles, but the experiment had given Telastra a good forty hours’ worth of time energy in the span of ten minutes.  

Things had been smoother from then on.  Candles had gotten them through high school, and college had given them plenty of opportunities to experiment.  Dragons almost never ate the same abstraction, so even the other dragontethers at Barry’s university had rarely, if ever, met a time-eating dragon.  Once, on a dare, Telastra had tried to flash-ferment grape juice and brewer’s yeast into wine - the resulting sludge had smelled so toxic that Barry had been forced to tell the RA that he’d been playing with his high school chemistry set.  They hadn’t tried that again.  

The evidence backlog at the CCPD was considerable, and it was several hours before Barry felt like he and Telastra had really begun to make a dent in it.  “Let’s take a break,” Barry said at around one in the afternoon, collapsing into a swivel chair.  “I need some lunch, and your hoard is probably piled high.”  

 _There is plenty of excess,_ Telastra said, her mental ‘voice’ taking on the slightly smug tone that it did when she was talking about the size of her personal energy stockpile.   _I can share some tonight if you want it,_ she offered.   _You have several books on your nightstand that you still have not finished.  I can help you speed-read through them._

“I have trouble retaining stuff when you do that,” Barry sighed.  “I do need to decide what I’m making to take for dinner at Joe’s house, though - can you help me read the cookbooks?”

 _I can do that._ Telastra rested her head on Barry’s knee, and he smiled.  

* * *

They finished checking in the evidence with an hour to spare, leaving Barry plenty of time to make it to the particle accelerator launch.  

Naturally, he’d been late again.  He’d gotten off the bus just in time to see the doors of STAR Labs swinging shut - “No more standing room,” they’d told him - and he’d been forced to wait in the rain until one of the new cops, a detective named Eddie Thawne, had been able to come by and take him back to the station.

 _I wish I could have helped,_ Telastra sighed in Barry’s mind once they arrived at the police station; the passenger seat of the squad car had been far too small for her.  

“I know it doesn’t work like that,” Barry said, touching the dragon’s neck automatically.  “But thanks anyway.  We can watch the news in the lab though, so it’s not like we’ll miss the whole thing.”  

They’d only be missing Harrison Wells’ speech, after all.  Seriously, he had a _time-hoarding dragon_ and he’d still managed to be late!  

He pulled the swivel chair over to the monitor, stepping over the puddle of water that had formed in the middle of the lab - not that it made much of a difference, he reflected with a grimace, since his shoes were soaked through anyway.  He switched on the screen, and the monitor immediately displayed the CCPN video feed, which was focused - as it had been all day - on coverage of the particle accelerator.  “I’m Linda Park,” said the reporter, “and I’m live outside STAR Labs despite the inclement weather, which is only going to get worse...”  

 _So they’ve switched on the accelerator?_ Telastra said, and Barry nodded.   _The storm really is nasty - you wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you were watching from STAR Labs._

Barry grinned.  “Ideally there wouldn’t be anything _to_ see,” he said.  “The actual accelerator is underground - if we could see it working, there would be a big problem.”  

_But I think there is a problem.  Why is there a klaxon blasting on the news?_

“What?”  Barry’s eyes widened, and he turned back to the broadcast.  There was something wrong with the accelerator - STAR Labs was being evacuated.  Barry thought about the crowd of people who had been packed inside, and reflected that it was a good thing he’d been late to the party after all.  

Naturally, at that precise moment, the power went out.  

Then, outside the window, the horizon was lit up by a column of gold light.  “Telastra, I think the particle accelerator just exploded,” said Barry numbly.  “Holy shit it just exploded.”

 _We need to get out of the lab,_ his dragon said.   _There’s too many windows - let’s go back downstairs -_

“You’re right, you’re right,” Barry muttered, backing away from the window as the expanding bubble of gold light rolled across the building.  “I just have to close the storm shutters - the skylight is letting rain in - ”

 _No, we need to go now!_ Telastra insisted, actually _grabbing his shirtsleeve_ in her teeth and pulling on him.  Barry’s jaw dropped in astonishment.   _I don’t like this!_

Barry drew in a deep breath to argue, and then felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, and on his head, and on his arms -

 _Barry, move!_ his dragon cried - and then a bolt of lightning shattered the skylight, arced down the metal chains, and slammed straight into Barry.    

Through the searing pain, Barry thought he saw a pair of panicked yellow eyes fixed directly on his own.  

Then he was hurled backwards, and everything went black.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this oneshot comes from the quote "As if you could kill time without wounding eternity" by Henry David Thoreau, and the series title comes from the quote “Invisible threads are the strongest ties” by Friedrich Nietzsche. Apparently I'm in the mood to use quotes for title ideas today. *shrugs*
> 
> Also, thanks go out to my beta reader, xerospark, for coming up with Telastra's name. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback are greatly appreciated. :)


End file.
